Word: conquests
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...traditional American frontier of horizontal space was receding into memory by 1920. In its place grew a new myth that supplied one of the core images of American art deco: the conquest of the air, by buildings and machines -- the taming of vertical space. The aircraft, with its fairings and streamlines, became the formal metaphor for a host of products from milkshake machines to staplers. Fantasy piled on fantasy: Bel Geddes, one of the master industrial designers of the period, looked at airfoils and fish and came up with the finned, monocoque body of his Motor Car Number...
Meanwhile, as static conquest of the air, the skyscraper multiplied the site, extruding a patch of earth into a stack of pure property: the abstract, universal sign of capitalism. The standardization of its floors invoked the image of the machine, like the use of bodies as mechanical parts in Busby Berkeley's choreography or the precisely drilled production-line kicks of the Rockettes. Its soaring shafts, tapering setbacks and elaborate stacking (for this was the age of Rockefeller Center, not of the banal glass box) hinted at vastly oversized Mayan temples; the contrast between glittering surface and deep wells...
...caused by Moscow's impossibly large requisitions of grain from the depleted farms, and it was maintained by preventing outside help from reaching the starving. No soup kitchens were set up, as they had been during the much less severe famines of the czarist era. Conquest argues that Stalin was aiming at the genocide of the Ukrainians, whose nationalist yearnings he despised and feared. The toll supports his view. Of the 7 million who died of hunger, 6 million were Ukrainians...
...snow and baked them into a sort of bread. A party official complained, "Look at the parasites! They went digging for acorns in the snow with their bare hands -- they'll do anything to get out of working." Villages became ghost towns, with families lying dead in every house. Conquest reckons that the final death toll from the entire war against the peasants was 14.5 million souls...
...traditional way at the entrance of a village, had been disfigured. The face of Christ had been obliterated; only the crown of thorns remained. The image may stand for all the innocents who perished on the Soviet land. Now, 50 years after they were effaced from memory, Conquest has succeeded in restoring their human faces...